In recent years, malicious programmers have created a variety of sophisticated targeted attacks aimed at high-profile or high-level entities, such as governments, corporations, political organizations, defense contractors, or the like. In many cases, the goal of such targeted attacks is to gain access to highly sensitive or confidential information, such as financial information, defense-related information, and/or intellectual property (e.g., source code), and/or to simply disrupt an entity's operations.
Many security software companies attempt to combat targeted attacks by creating and deploying malware signatures (e.g., hash functions that uniquely identify known malware) to their customers on a regular basis. However, a significant number of the above-mentioned attacks involve malware that has been carefully crafted to take advantage of an as-yet-undiscovered vulnerability of a particular application (commonly known as a “zero-day” exploit). As such, these attacks are often difficult for traditional security software to detect and/or neutralize since the exploits in question have yet to be publicly discovered.
In addition to or as an alternative to a signature-based approach, some security software companies may apply a variety behavior-based heuristics to detect targeted attacks. Unfortunately, a significant number of targeted attacks (e.g., advance persistent threats) may obscure their malicious behaviors by moving at a slow pace such that traditional security software may be unable to distinguish individual malicious behaviors of the targeted attacks from legitimate behaviors. Accordingly, the instant disclosure identifies an addresses a need for systems and methods for detecting attacks on computing systems.